Tuesday, March 26, 2013

New coronavirus could become SARS-like epidemic due to superspreader patients: experts

People who think the new coronavirus couldn’t take off and cause a
SARS-like crisis may have forgotten a phenomenon that was a game-changer
during SARS — patients called superspreaders.
At present, this new coronavirus doesn’t seem to spread easily from
person to person, a fact which some people use to argue it will not
become the next SARS. Some limited human transmission has occurred, but
confirmed cases are few and sporadically seen.
However, several experts suggest that superspreaders, which turned
SARS into a global outbreak, could do the same with this new virus. That
term refers to people who buck the transmission trend with a given
bacteria or virus, infecting many more people than is the norm.